Growing Boys by Robert Aickman

 GROWING BOYS by Robert Aickman

“…and there were the two boys blocking the way, tall as Fiona Macleod’s lordly ones, muscular as Gogmagog, rising above the puny banks of earth.”

As a counterpoint to Daphne du Maurier’s own ‘The Lordly Ones’ (equally based on Fiona Macleod) and their effect on a neuro-diverse boy, this is Aickman’s outlandish prophetic satire that involves a  co-vivid dream, via a fortune-telling crystal ball, of cannibalism by twin sons eating their own father. A father who had moved to North Zero to become a Liberal political candidate. 

Each time one reads this story, the more outlandish it seems to become! The final time I read it in the future, I predict the two boys will have grown so monstrous that they will fill my brain and burst it! 

The story of Millie, their mother, meanwhile, is highly poignant as she is exploited and coerced by the boys’ father, and sexually importuned by her uncle (who seems to keep lots of weapons in his house from the war as well as lots of waistcoats with sagging pockets) and she is also sexually importuned by a female fortune-teller who is a classic fiction character to marvel at!

The ‘huge, gluey toffees’, the Lavender Bag cafe, the big black stool that had once belonged to a potentate who had waded through blood up to his knees,  and ‘some kind of schoolboy muck’ that had blocked the barrel of Millie’s uncle’s  machine gun, and much more, all included and connected, no doubt,  with “the freaks and zanies that people urban and suburban areas in the later part of the twentieth century.” 

I know where Aickman was coming from, I guess.

“I never dared to read horror stories and ghost stories,” Millie says here, somewhere, but I now forget the meaning of its context. My brain is surely still recovering!

All my Aickman reviews: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/robert-aickman/